Wednesday, May 18, 2005

Kathleen Parker: More Perspective, Please

While I don't endorse her editorial 100% (she's way too easy on Newsweek - dangerous stories should require a higher threshold of proof), Kathleen Parker has an excellent contribution to the debate. Like Friedman, she puts most of the blame on the fanatics who rioted in the first place. Some highlights:

...You could flush a Bible down the toilet in front of Goober in Kabul, and it's unlikely that Mayberry suddenly would be awash in blood.

Without disrespecting true believers of Islam, one also could debate the relative miseries of seeing our favorite scripture disappear into the plumbing versus, say, watching airplanes fly into buildings, killing thousands of innocents. Remember, these are terrorist suspects captured after 9/11, not kidnapped members of an Afghan boys choir...

... The same people foaming over a reported act of blasphemy didn't flinch while executing women for stepping outside sans burqa. I'm afraid my moral outrage in favor of the morally outrageous is tapped out.

While the world was reacting in righteous indignation to the Newsweek report, another story was circulating about Turkish women in Germany being executed by family members in "honor killings" sanctioned by certain interpretations of the Koran. Their offense? Acting like Western women. Or, in the pithy words of a 14-year-old Turkish boy who was justifying an execution: "The whore lived like a German." (Now where have I heard that last phrase? Oh, yeah, in the 35 million spam German e-mails I've received in the last week...-Mark)

Would that the Kossacks and Deaniacs would take Parker's words to heart...but I'm not holding my breath.